The University of Illinois seeks more money to hire teachers

URBANA, Ill. (AP) – Officials at the University of Illinois are seeking a large increase in state funds to offset the hiring of paralyzed staff, while enrollment has increased during the state's two-year budget impasse.

Administrators say the Urbana-Champaign campus is now the latest among its national 10-member group with a student-to-faculty ratio of 18 to 1 after the campus ranked sixth in 2008, The (Champaign) News reported. -Gazette.

The trustees voted Thursday at a meeting in Chicago to approve the request for an increase in state funding of $ 98 million, or 16.5 percent, with two-thirds of those planned for hiring and retaining teachers.

The request comes when total enrollment at the three campuses of the university grew 2.7 percent to almost 85,600 students, including a 3.2 percent increase in the student body of Urbana-Champaign to 49,339 for the eighth consecutive year of record registration.

Executive Vice President Barbara Wilson said the University of Michigan has been able to maintain a ratio of 12 students per teacher since 2008 even when enrollment increased by 11 percent because it was able to continue hiring teachers.

"We are losing competitiveness on that front," Wilson told the trustees. "This directly affects the students' experience: how big your classes are and how well you serve your students."

Wilson said that the administrators of the Urbana-Champaign, Chicago and Springfield campuses are developing aggressive plans for hiring teachers

"This is the reason why this budget request is so important," he said. to "reconstruct the numbers of our professors".

University officials say the system received only about 28 percent of its typical state funding in 2016 and that the deficit has not been repaid

Trustee Edward McMillan said the university can not trust the State to obtain additional money, and noted that state support has been declining for the past 15 years.

"We have to figure out how to do it on our own," said McMillan.

The university plan would dedicate $ 10 million to the hiring of teaching staff, with $ 23.8 million for general increases of an average of 2 percent, and $ 35.7 million for departments to retain the best teachers or adjust the salaries have delayed.

The president of the university, Tim Killeen, said that a decrease in the hiring of professors is "directly attributable to the fact that state funding decreased"

"It was not something we planned to do, we had to tighten our belts "Killeen said. "We need to rebuild that"

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Information from: The News-Gazette, http://www.news-gazette.com